Introduction Why the Beatles?

Abstract

They have not made music together for more than three and a half decades, and their founder has been dead for more than a quarter of a century, but the world still cannot get enough of the Beatles. Other names from the “British Invasion” of pop music in the 1960s—Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, P.J. Proby, Freddie and the Dreamers—now survive only in trivia quizzes, but the Beatles are still going strong, still breaking sales records, still setting the pace in the music industry. In 2000, the Beatles were third on Forbes’ magazine annual list of celebrity earners, largely as the result of the publication of a massive oral history of the group, The Beatles Anthology. In 2001, Beatles 1, a compilation of the group’s twenty-seven number one hits—all of which had already been released on vinyl and CD at least three times—sold twelve million copies worldwide in the first twelve weeks of its release. Paul McCartney’s “Driving USA” tour—in which the Beatles’ former bassist played twenty-two of that band’s songs—was the world’s most successful concert series of 2002, earning $103 million in gate receipts. Returning to his Beatle roots worked so well for McCartney that for his 2005 tour, he increased the number of Beatles tunes in his set list to twenty-five.